Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

This post begins another sporadic blogging series which I have affectionately dubbed "BS Writing Advice." I believe the title explains itself. But for the purposes of establishing a mission statement and sticking to it, I will declare that I intend to write about the ubiquitous Pro Tips for writers which are, in my humble opinion, bullshit. I also intend to explain why they're bullshit, of course, or the posts would be very short and useless.

Item number one in the series is rule numero uno for "good writing": kill all teh adverbs!

As every writer knows, adverbs are pure poison. You can't open any book or blog on writing without seeing a tirade against them. We have computer programs now that you can run your manuscripts through to identify "problem words" that end with "-ly." Stephen King, in his memoir/style guide On Writing, likens them to pernicious weeds in his garden.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day...fifty the day after that...and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's—GASP!!—too late.

With all due respect to Mr. King, whose advice is largely spot-on, this particular piece is bullshit. The thing is, most of what we say consists of adverbs. If adverbs are dandelions on the lawn, then everyone's lawns must consist primarily of the weeds, with only a few blades of grass poking out in between. I'm serious. Let's take the same passage as above and print the adverbial components in red:

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day...fifty the day after that...and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's—GASP!!—too late.

Adverbs aren't just the reviled single words that end in "-ly." We also have adverbial prepositional and infinitive phrases, subordinate clauses that function as adverbs, and common demonstrative adverbs like "then" and "there." We have conjunctive adverbs, like "too," and disjunctive adverbs that modify entire ideas, like "however" and "to put it another way." Time/place words like "yesterday" are usually adverbs (e.g. "I ate cake yesterday," with "yesterday" modifying "ate"). So. Now that you realize this, are you going to go back through all of your stories and weed out any instances of the word "yesterday"?

The adverb haters don't differentiate between single words and phrases. One of Stephen King's examples of the evils of adverbs is:

"I'm the plumber," he said with a flush.

Yes, it's a funny quip (or at least it's supposed to be), but if you're going to take issue with adverbial phrases like "with a flush," then you might as well throw out the rest, too. Let's raze them all!

I believe the road to hell is paved, and I will shout it. Adverbs are like dandelions. One looks pretty and unique. You find five...fifty...and, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is covered. You see them, but it's—GASP!!—late.

There now. Nary an adverb in sight. Isn't that better?

Of course, I just reduced the paragraph to nonsense. This is identifiable reason number one that anti-adverb campaigns are bullshit: adverbs can contain crucial information. Imagine an entire book, or even a short conversation, with no modifiers answering the questions when, where, why, how, or how much. We use adverbs because we need them; very little of the information we need to convey in writing or speech is contained in simple subjects and verbs.

Identifiable reason number two to give adverbs a little respect is that they can be important stylistically. Did King really need that "however"? No. He could have said, "But if you fail to root it out." Or he could have just left the basic sentence alone; his meaning is crystal clear without it. He included it anyway. Why? Because it puts a split-second pause in the middle of the sentence, an opportunity for the reader to place the upcoming clause in context.

Adverbs can break the flow and give a lofty, removed feel to your words, but sometimes this is precisely what you want. Often you want to pace a sentence and delay the punch at the end. Or maybe you want to give a passage a sing-song, satirical tone. J. K. Rowling is the queen of sing-songy adverbs.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

Now take a look at it without the "unnecessary" adverbs (even leaving in the clauses and phrases this time).

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were normal, thank you. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they didn't hold with such nonsense.

Blah. Just...blah. I didn't suck all the charm out of it, but I killed a substantial amount just by deleting those little superfluous ornaments. Imagine if Rowling had believed the articles that told her she needed to get rid of them all, or if she'd had the bad luck to fall in with a newbie editor who believed that bestselling authors don't do adverbs?

What people meant to do when they made up the bullshit rule to get rid of all adverbs was to say that writers should avoid weak writing and redundancy. But you can write weak and redundant adjectives, verbs, pronouns...The poor single-word adverbs are just the words with the obvious "kick me" signs on their backs. You see the "-ly," and you're on the lookout for trouble.

Adverbs can be redundant if you're silly enough to write something like "He shouted loudly" or "He thought contemplatively." But not all of them are. Here are some examples from the first few pages of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, which I just pulled off the shelf (I figure if anyone would pare down the adverbs to only the bare necessities, it would be E. B. White).

"I don't see why he needs an ax," continued Fern, who was only eight.

Mrs. Arable put a pitcher of cream on the table. "Don't yell, Fern!" she said. "Your father is right. The pig would probably die anyway."

Mr. Arable stopped walking. "Fern," he said gently, "you will have to learn to control yourself."

Each of these adverbs ads something to its sentence that wouldn't be there otherwise. Without "only," the first sentence is a simple statement of fact: Fern is eight years old. There's no particular importance to this tidbit. It's just written there, you know, in case you were interested. Saying that she is only eight, on the other hand, adds perspective—Fern is a child, an innocent. Mrs. Arable's "probably" gives her the disinterested tone of an adult. She is not saying that the piglet is sick and should be killed, nor that the piglet would be fine and should live. She doesn't know, and she doesn't give a damn either way. And Mr. Arable's delivery contradicts the authoritative tone of his words. If you just read the line, "Fern, you will have to learn to control yourself," you would probably think he is a strict, heartless parent; the "gently" establishes him as gentle but firm.

Of course, the most extreme adverb-haters will say that if White really wanted, he could have done linguistic gymnastics to avoid using "gently" at all. He could have used the verb "soothed" instead. He could have written:

Mr. Arable stopped walking and looked at his daughter with gentle eyes. "Fern," he said, "you will have to learn to control yourself.

Tada! No adverb! Now it's showing, not telling. Six-year-olds, who can't yet extrapolate character and intentions from small physical cues, won't understand it...but whatever, the adverb's gone. And we only used one sappy eight-word platitude to replace it!

You'll see a lot of blanket statements like, "Adverbs are a lazy tool of a weak mind." But I think the lazy ones are the writers who make war on certain classes of words just because other people say they're bad news. They don't want to pay attention to every word they write and make sure they're saying exactly what they mean in the clearest way possible. They just want a rule they can follow blindly. They're too lazy to acknowledge that the root of the problem is not the inherent properties of adverbs, but the lazy way they're used.

And a lot of people do use them inappropriately. A lot of people also get their intransitive and transitive verbs confused and say, "I'm going to go lay down." Should we also make the word "lay" off-limits, then? You can say a lot of things other than "lay," can't you? You can say that you "put" or "set" or "placed" something down instead. Or you can rework the passage so that you don't have to mention the transfer of objects from one place to another at all!

Yes, it sounds absurd. It seems silly to insist that everyone avoid a particular word just because some people tend to use it incorrectly. But we need rules like these, I tell you, to stop the "lay"-men from going wild. That's the only way we will preserve the sanctity of the English language—by eradicating whole chunks of it.